Jane Mount poses for a photo with some of her work at the Hui No‘eau Visual Arts Center. Courtesy photo

The Hui No’eau Visual Arts Center is hosting “Particles,” a solo show with Maui artist Jane Mount featuring a series of textile collages, through May 15.

Mount said the show explores “how we are all part of the universe and connected within it, and yet we only experience what our current tools allow us to, and we understand very little.”

The Hui’s Solo Artist Exhibition series gives artists an opportunity to be involved in all facets of exhibition planning and installation, challenging them to envision and produce an innovative and cohesive body of work.

“They do it every two years, and when you’re applying, you say what you think you want to do. Then you have a whole year to produce the work,” explained Mount, who is exhibiting along with Oahu artist Michelle Schwengel-Regala.

For Mount’s first Hui show, the Ulupalakua-based artist worked with textiles, focusing one piece “on the idea of the cosmos and space and what we think we understand about it and what we don’t. It’s definitely through the lens of me interpreting what the science says, but also all the different myths that we have and that we create to try to explain the world around us.”

An acclaimed illustrator, designer and writer who has published several books, Mount said she wanted to challenge herself with a different medium. “I’m an illustrator in my day job, and I’ve written and illustrated some books. But I have found that over many years of doing it, when the thing you love doing, painting, becomes your job, it does become a job.”

Drawing and painting, “I get tighter and tighter and more perfect, and I think that’s very limiting in terms of getting feeling out there in a way,” she said. “So I like to explore new mediums because when you’re new and bad at something, it’s very freeing. It’s a great luxury to be bad at something. You get to start from scratch and you have no preconceptions on what you should be able to do and it lets you be free to be more creative.”

The exhibit includes works with titles such as “Paradox,” “Stardust,” “Cosmos” and “Portal,” comprising found textiles with sequins, ribbon and thread hand-stitched on linen.

While living in New York, Mount became renowned for her paintings of the spines of books on bookshelves as a way to express individual personalities. The New York Times Book Review noted: “As a ‘shy, dorky kid with few friends,’ Mount turned to books and fell in love with them as physical objects. They also became her muses, and she began drawing covers, a testament to her abiding affection.”

Because she had to give up a studio space, she began painting at her tiny dining room table. “It was right next to our bookshelf,” she recalled. “So I thought I’ll just paint some books.”

When a friend stopped by and wanted to buy all four of her newly completed bookshelf works, she knew she was onto something. “I was like, whoa, that’s so weird. No one ever reacts that viscerally to paintings.”

Soon she was painting famous people’s book collections. “I started painting my friend’s bookshelves, and I realized it was actually much more interesting if I asked them, ‘What are your 10 favorite books? What are the books you think made you who you are, that are so important to you that you feel like they changed you in some way?’ I would just paint the spines of them together on a blank piece of paper, and it makes almost like a portrait of the person from the inside instead of the outside. People really respond to it.”

One of Jane Mount’s paintings of a bookshelf. Mount is known for depicting readers’ personalities through their favorite books. Courtesy photo

Collaborating with Thessaly La Force, Mount published “My Ideal Bookshelf.”

“We interviewed a bunch of famous people from all different genres, writers but also chefs and painters and all different things, and asked them their favorite books,” she said.

They included authors Alice Waters and James Patterson, artist Maira Kalman, directors Judd Apatow and Miranda July, chef David Chang, and musician Patti Smith.

Then came “Bibliophile,” “which is all about everything you can love about books,” she explained. “It includes both stacks of books from different genres and drawings of beloved bookstores from around the country and libraries.”

A Washington Post review praised: “This whimsically illustrated guide to all things even tangentially book-related should delight fans of literary minutiae.”

In 2023, she published her first children’s book, “Books Make Good Friends.”

“It’s slightly semi-autobiographical because, when I was a kid, I was very shy and had glasses, braces, the whole bit, and spent all my time reading books and not making friends,” she said. “It’s basically a great book for kids who like to read or even ones who don’t, to try to discover why reading can be so special.”

About her new Hui show, she said, “I really tried to make the room there a full experience. When you walk in, hopefully it creates a feeling for you as well as for each individual piece to look at.”

The Hui No’eau’s “Solo Artist Exhibition 2026: Jane Mount & Michelle Schwengel-Regala” is free and open to the public.